Agile Development
Coherent utilizes Agile software development as its standard methodology with over 60% of the company’s projects using some flavor of Agile across a wide variety of environments. It’s Coherent’s experience that Agile’s emphasis on teamwork, collaboration, and tangible results is the most effective way to organize distributed teams.
The approach is well suited to Coherent’s highly collaborative & transparent delivery approach and takes advantage of our teams’ strong communication skills and natural time overlap with North American and European clients.
Coherent’s agile development approach provides:
- Visibility of the product and progress throughout the project
- Accountability for the resources on the project
- Flexibility to adjust the business direction throughout the project
- Predictable production releases
The following diagram illustrates the Coherent’s basic agile approach mapped against the traditional SDLC
Although the duration of sprints varies from project to project, Coherent Solutions generally recommends two week sprints while using agile development methodology. This duration is long enough for meaningful work to be completed. We also recommend combing 4-6 sprints into a release that is sent to production. The duration of a release needs to be weighed against the overhead and risk of updating software in production.
Prior to starting each release, the project team works with the product owner to determine which work items will be included in the release. Releases often contain a mixture of feature, enhancement, fix requests, and professional service request work items. The work items are then distributed across the sprints in the release. The final sprint of a release is often reserved for regression testing the product prior to release to production. Task burn down and feature velocity metrics are used as the primary gauges of the health of the project.
